This is exactly it, what @ff is saying.
Most of these statues are repros and scattered about the South in an attempt to rewrite history. They are knockoffs, made of thin metal, not solid or thick walled casting.
That’s why they crumple like this when they get knocked over. They’re cheap, made to look like a Rodin or classical bronze casting, to imbue the observer with a sense of power and History, as if it’s important.
What’s more, most of these things were put in at the tail end of right after reconstruction, during Jim Crow, and then again in another big wave in the 1960’s during the civil rights era as a protest against racial equality.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-real-story-of-all-those-confederate-statues/
These things don’t need to be preserved. Southern states are under immense pressure from white supremacists to enshrine them in the protections of law in perpetuity. But the real story is they are shoddy work like the pulp fiction of the South. They are a slap in the face of every black Southerner and like-minded white person. We got rid of slavery for just this reason: old thinking that needed to be changed. And here we are, 150 years later, still fighting this same old thinking.
Fuck these stupid statues. Grind them up and make pennies out of them, for all I care. Any shreds of history will be preserved. We have plenty of pictures and lots and lots of stuff on the internet and in books about them. The space they are taking up can be put to better use, like trees and gardens, or how about pure artwork commissioned by the state. Lots of alternatives. Get rid of them. They are worthless.
